Developer Week in Review: Talking to your phone

Getting serious about Siri, Open Office on the rocks, and Google embraces SQL.

I’ve spent the last week or so getting up to speed on the ins and outs of Vex Robotics tournaments since I foolishly volunteered to be competition coordinator for an event this Saturday. I’ve also been helping out my son’s team, offering design advice where I could. Vex is similar to Dean Kamen’s FIRST Robotics program, but the robots are much less expensive to build. That means many more people can field robots from a given school and more people can be hands-on in the build. If you happen to be in southern New Hampshire this Saturday, drop by Pinkerton Academy and watch two dozen robots duke it out.

In non-robotic news …

Why Siri matters

It’s easy to dismiss Siri, Apple’s new voice-driven “assistant” for the iPhone 4S, as just another refinement of the chatbot model that’s been entertaining people since the days of ELIZA. No one would claim that Siri could pass the Turing test, for example. But, at least in my opinion, Siri is important for several reasons.

On a pragmatic level, Siri makes a lot of common smartphone tasks much easier. For example, I rarely used reminders on the iPhone and preferred to use a real keyboard when I had to create appointments. But Siri makes adding a reminder or appointment so easy that I have made it pretty much my exclusive method of entering them. It also is going to be a big win for drivers trying to use smartphones in their cars, especially in states that require hands-free operations.

I suspect Siri will also end up being a classic example of crowdsourcing. If I were Apple, I would be capturing every “miss” that Siri couldn’t handle and looking for common threads. Since Siri is essentially doing natural language processing and applying rules to your requests, Apple can improve Siri progressively by adding the low-hanging fruit. For example, at the moment, Siri balks at a question like, “How are the Patriots doing?” I’d be shocked if it fails to answer that question in a year since sports scores and standings will be at the heart of commonly asked questions.

For developers, the benefits of Siri are obvious. While it’s a closed box right now, if Apple follows its standard model, we should expect to see API and SDK support for it in future releases of iOS. At the moment, apps that want voice control (and they are few and far between) have to implement it themselves. Once apps can register with Siri, any app will be able to use voice.

Velocity Europe, being held Nov. 8-9 in Berlin, will bring together the web operations and performance communities for two days of critical training, best practices, and case studies.

Can Open Office survive?

Long-time WIR readers will know that I’m no fan of how Oracle has treated its acquisitions from Sun. A prime example is OpenOffice. In June, OpenOffice was spun off from Oracle, and therefore lost its allowance. Now the OpenOffice team is passing around the hat, looking for funds to keep the project going.

We need to support Open Office because it’s the only project that really keeps Microsoft honest as far as providing open standards access to Microsoft Office products. It’s also the only way that Linux users can deal with the near-ubiquitous use of Office document formats in the real world (short of running Office in a VM or with Wine.)

The revenge of SQL

The NoSQL crowd has always had Google App Engine as an ally since the only database available to App Engine apps has been the App Engine Datastore, which (among other things) doesn’t support joins. But much as Apple initially rejected multitasking on the iPhone (until it decided to embrace it), Google appears to have thrown in the towel as far as SQL goes.

It’s always dangerous to hold an absolutist position (with obvious exceptions, such as despising Jar Jar Binks). SQL may have been overused in the past, but it’s foolish to reject SQL altogether. It can be far too useful at times. SQL can be especially handy, as an example, when developing pure REST-like web services. It’s nice to see that Google has taken a step back from the edge. Or, to put it more pragmatically, that it listens to its customer base on occasion.

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Funny question to ask, when the LibreOffice fork seems to be thriving on developer enthusiasm instead of corporate welfare, and has shot ahead of OpenOffice in features (from what I’ve heard). Would it be so bad to let the original OpenOffice branch atrophy and die?

Chris Anderson

Agree with previous commentor. Why not just support Libre Office, which seems to have all that Open Office has in terms of features and is already built on a sustainable organizational structure?

I have to agree with the previous two commenters, OpenOffice is dead and has been since the fork with LibreOffice happened.

The only reason anyone would still want to support OpenOffice over LibreOffice might be the license, something that only matters to corporate users planning on monetizing their own OO-branch and it would seem not many of them care to pick up OpenOffice’s tab.

OpenOffice’s death would imho also send a rather strong signal to corporations like Oracle about how not to treat a community and about what happens when you do mistreat a community like they seem to be so fond of doing.